Park Place
Park Place on the 2,3 is the first stop on the branch that carries Broadway-7th Avenue West Side IRT Express trains through the Clark Street tunnels into Brooklyn after trains diverge from local trains at Chambers Street. The station is relatively deep because the line underpins the R Line near City Hall (opened in January 1918) and 4,5 trains (opened in 1905) just north of Fulton Street which were already built when the station opened on August 1, 1918. The A,C,E station was built above the western end of the station station and opened on September 10, 1932 as the original southern terminus of the first IND Line, the 8th Avenue Subway. The station has a single island platform with a line of blue columns that say Park Place and a mostly gold trim line along the top of the track walls with Ps at regular intervals above the usual tiles.
The platform has entrances at each end. Towards the western end of the platform, two long staircases lead up to an intermediate landing where another, shorter staircase leads up to the long, full length IND mezzanine (for photos of this exit see the IND station page) at Chambers Street-World Trade Center by the full Oculus mosaic. From here, there is a bank of turnstiles by the streetstair for the NW corner of Park Place and Church Street, with full underground access outside of fare control to all the other exits from the IND station. A staircase leads down to the very southern end of the A,C Platform. Lots of signs on the A,C platform say '2,3 Last Stairway'. To reach the E platform passengers must walk down the A platform to the last staircase, go up to a different part of the mezzanine, crossover and then reach the northern end of the E's terminal platform. The reason for this complex transfer is to allow a continues underground mezzanine outside of fare control from the southern end at the World Trade Center (where by leaving a fare control a passenger can walk all the way to the 2/3 Station at Fulton/William Streets without leaving fare control) to the most northern streetstairs at Chambers and Church Street (just one block east of the Chambers Street stop on the IRT 2,3 at Chambers Street and West Broadway), a distance of 7 blocks (a third of a mile).
The platform has its own exit at is eastern (Brooklyn-bound) end. Here a staircase at the extreme end of the platform followed by two single escalators (the closer one to the end of the platform normally goes down, the far one goes up) Lead up to a mezzanine just beneath the street. The staircase splits into two separate staircases at an initial landing, and each of the seperate two staircases have another intermediate landing. On this mezzanine, there are turnstiles, both regular and high entrance (from when the token booth was part time and regular turnstiles could not be left unstaffed). A single street stair leads out to the NW corner of Broadway and Park Place. The signage for this entrance is the only one that has Park Place and only has bullets for the 2,3. There are a few steps up to a dark abandoned area, this use to be an entrance into the bottom of the Wolworth Building but has since been closed. The Wolworth Building is not tourist friendly and hates tourists coming in to see its art deco lobby. This is probably the reason this entrance was closed right after 9/11 and never reopened.
Photos 1-13: May 19, 2010; 14-18: January 30, 2013; 19-20: March 2, 2013; 21-23: May 19, 2013
